bobpeers -> blog

I’ve recently had a problem when using EPIServer with either Firefox or Google Chrome. We’re using version 5 and the HTML editor used, HTMLarea, does not support either browser.

I should also mention that the HTML editor is pretty terrible especially when compared to CKEEditor, for example.

As an example, if I write some style rule like this using the source code:

style="border:0"

then after saving the editor manages to mangle to HTML so it looks like this:

style="BORDER-TOP:0;BORDER-BOTTOM:0;BORDER-LEFT:0;BORDER-RIGHT:0

It manages to expand a simple rule plus add ALL CAPS into the mix (which will not validate as valid XHTML by the way).

But to get back to the point, since the editor is not supported I end up with a very small textarea in Firefox that’s hard to use.

To try and solve the problem I tried the Firefox addon called Resizeable Textarea but this doesn’t work in Firefox 3.6 plus it requires manual resizing every time.

The solution that worked for me is the Stylish addon that allows me to override the CSS rules for any site. I simply made a new rule to resize the textarea looking like this.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://intranet/login") {
textarea.epitextareaeditor  {height:20em !important}
.episize500 {width:800px !important}
}

A similar extension, called Chrome Stylist, is available for Google Chrome that works almost identically.

I’ve used Chrome on and off in Windows for a while now but finally tried it out on Linux (Ubuntu 9.10 to be exact). It was easy to install the .deb file from Google and I had it running without any problems in less than a minute.

Feature wise it’s the same as the Windows version but the performance is fantastic, it starts in under a second and page loads take fractions of a second. The whole browser feels incredibly fast, in fact faster than anything I’ve tried before.

I recommend that if you’re running Debian or Ubuntu you should give it a try and see what you think.

Well I guess like every other technology blogger I should give my impression of Google Chrome so as not to disappoint here goes.

Overall I’m very impressed, especially for a first beta release.

1. It’s fast, start up speed is blazingly fast and rendering time on regular pages is good. Javascript heavy sites are very responsive with little or no delay.
2. It’s simple, uncluttered interface is very appealing. It gets the job done with a minimum of options and fuss.
3. If you save pages as applications shortcuts it really does blur the line between local applications on your PC and those running from the internet. A bit like the shortcuts using in some netbooks where email points directly to gmail but even more so.
4. As far as another browser in the marketplace I think more competition can only be a good thing.
5. Very pleased they made it open source, no doubt the new V8 Javascript virtual machine and other elements will make it into other browsers. This will raise the bar for all browser vendors.
6. Looking at the speed improvements it leaves the other browsers way behind and makes IE7/8 seem even more bloated. If Google really push this then it I think it’s a major threat to IE, plus it really takes the wind out of the sails of the unreleased IE8 (not like there was much excitement to begin with).
7. If people are going to use this as their main browser it will need extensions. I just can’t handle seeing adverts again!

Of course I’ve only tested this on Windows (not my OS of choice) but I’m really looking forward to running it on Linux when available.